Here. Squeeze your head into this helmet, see if it fits. What? No, I’ve never seen the movie Scarface. Not all the way through, anyway. Why?
Mother of pearl. I’m surrounded by moaners. Nobody wants to wear a freaking space helmet, not even Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s afraid of getting “helmet hair” of all things. (His so-called “hair” is made of leftover brass fittings from what appeared to be a Victorian era lawn mower.) I keep telling these people – if we’re going to pile into that substandard missile Mitch Macaphee found for us and fly to distant solar systems, we will need at least minimal protective gear, to include a) a helmet, b) a bag of oxygen, c) some portable food, preferably sandwiches, d) THERE IS NO “D”, e) boots, non hobnail variety, and f) a bunch of other stuff that you might need for space travel on the cheap. (Look it up on the Web.)
Would that that were the worst of our problems. Fact is, Mitch’s missile is a real piece of crap, not worthy of sending a payload of trailmix into space, let alone flesh-and-blood musicians such as ourselves. I have put out some inquiries about alternative transportation. Nothing yet, I’m afraid. Beginning to think we should abandon the idea of private transportation and just sign aboard one of those interstellar budget tours. You know – you take a jitney to the moon, wait there for about six days until the big Trailways spacebus shows up. You squeeze in next to a spotty couple from Boca Raton while a morbidly 
obese business man in a rumpled tan business suit coughs his lungs out in the seat behind you.
Yeah. Been there, done that, haven’t you? Well… haven’t we all? Anyway, I’m a little tired, frankly. Matt and I have been working at a furious pace ever since we started that pod cast. A session a week – nearly an hour and a half of music making! Yes, I know that sounds impossibly ambitious, but… we’re motivated. We’ve started about half a dozen recordings. Our plan is to do a rough initial draft of each song, play that on the podcast, then finish tracking the song and release it later as a finished number. We’re starting with Quality Lincoln, which will be featured on the next episode, due out…. in a matter of days…. right?
Right. Yeah, I’m tired. Sandman’s beating me to death. What did I ever do to him, eh?
Oh, hi. You’re getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present…) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green’s music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn’t even know was there when we were tracking them. That’s part of the Big Green method, man. It’s a bit like found sound; it’s basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment.
Yeah, you heard me right. In the midst of preparing for Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011 and of being ejected from our home of nearly ten years (the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill), we’ve elected to launch a podcast. I know this sounds crazy, but … hear me out. The world is full of blowhards and know-nothings. Fact is, a lot of blowhards are know-nothings. So the harder we blow, the less we know – follow me? And if we don’t know we have problems, like impending eviction, for instance, well that’s almost like not having any problems at all. An elegant solution, and it costs next to nothing… or at least a good deal less than our legal counsel was planning on charging us. (Anti-Lincoln has some rapacious per diem rates, I’m here to tell you. Just watch your ass.)